Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
(See “National Gallery” map,
here
.)
For 500 years, a great artist was someone who could paint the real world with perfect ac-
curacy. Then along came the camera, and, click, the artist was replaced by a machine. But
unemployed artists refused to go the way of
The Fighting Téméraire.
They couldn't match the camera for painstaking detail, but they could match it—even
beat it—in capturing color, the fleeting moment, the candid pose, the play of light and
shadow, the quick impression. A new breed of artists burst out of the stuffy confines of
the studio. They donned scarves and berets and set up their canvases in farmers' fields or
carried their notebooks into crowded cafés, dashing off quick sketches in order to catch a
momentary...impression.
• Start with the misty Monet train station.
Monet—
Gare St
.
Lazare
(1877)
Claude Monet, the father of Impressionism, was more interested in the play of light off his
subject than the subject itself. He uses smudges of white and gray paint to capture how
sun filters through the glass roof of the train station and is refiltered through the clouds of
steam.
